Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 200%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (200%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12400 (100%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.